EVE General Discussion

I hate these things. I wish they would get deleted from the game. While CCP introduced ECM fighters to carriers I can accept this because you can have max 1 per carrier, or 2 per super, with all the weaknesses of ECM in an easily jammable package (ironic isn't it).

The prospect of getting jammed out by 5 throwaway drones or an entire dronebay of the damn things disgusts me greatly, these rancid turd drones are too cheap and accessible and thanks to their dice roll behaviour have a ridiculous opportunity to jam out ships bonused on sensor strength.

CCP Rise has said they wanted to address the problems with ECM some day, let's start by removing or dramatically changing the most reductive level of gameplay for combat ships. If you insist on ECM drones remaining in the game, then they should function like ECM burst and only break the lock for one server tick, not for 20 seconds. They remain at a 20s cycle time so they cannot just throw probability at your face every tick and neuter you regardless.

Or make them a gurista LP store/BPC drop, consume 2x as much drone bandwidth (so lights use 10, mediums 20, heavies 50) so that these cheese mobiles cannot be spammed as a last ditch GTFO get out of jail free card.

So frustrated at this P.O.S. example of game design surviving the chopping board when drones were redone. ECM drones actively ruin this game.

Ok.

I lost both my grandfathers and 3 uncles to it.

Did you have a point about the content of the post?

I thought I had....

Because people being able to defend themselves and deprive content from you, is cancer. How dare those schmucks not become tallies on your killboard and use every tool at their disposal to avoid being welped! The nerve!

Hard the flip up!

Holy Circle-Of-Whine.... rly?

ECM drones have 1, 1.5 and 2 jam strength (small, med, heavy) per drone and I'm not aware of any skill/mod that affects this value (maybe Signal Dispersion with a max of 25%, but wouldn't make any sense or even a big difference anyway). Using a max skilled falcon (oh the irony...) without additional sensor strength mods we'd look at a value of 33.6 grav strength. This means a single small drone has a gigantic chance of 1/33.6 = ca. 3% to land a successful jam. Even if someone throws a full flight of these at you, there's a 0.97^5 = 85% chance for you NOT to get jammed.

Yes, there is this little problem with being able to spam ecm drones by recalling them and having them attack once more to increase the chance per timeframe instread of having them wait out an entire jam cycle (I don't know however if that has been fixed already).

In the end, those are drones that can be disposed of pretty quickly and which offer a very very very very very slim chance for the other party to actually jam you out. So if you are either unable to kill those drones fast enough or failed to have sufficient redundant tackle on the target, you imho didn't deserve the kill anyway.

In true eve spirit the most fitting answer to your problem might therefore be: HTFU!

EDIT: for further info read the sig of the above post, nuff said...

I don't see webbing drones, tp drones, neuting drones or damping drones just randomly allowing a losing player at 2km to get out of combat scot-free. That's why they're broken. BROKEN. Not overpowered, completely BROKEN. I could handle ecm drones if they just made you lose lock, because then you can get a bump while relocking but that's not the case.

Svipul disagrees...

It's not pathetic. The bonuses to tracking/missile application, the barely present neuting effect of those drones (which can be destroyed because they don't lock the target out from responding completely with his own drones, etc) are not even remotely comparable to the power of an ECM drone. This line of reasoning is dead in the water, they're not even in the same ballpark of relative power in terms of what can be achieved with them. What if the guy instead uses his bullshit drones to instead kill me? Am I to sit here an nod my head and say "this is fine" that some dinky little ship I cannot neut, damp or otherwise counterattack if my only valid defense (my own drones) is already occupied, is balanced against the relative power it can wield over the target it jams?

The earlier point about ship jam strengths is also a big point of contention. 1 point of jamming, 10% chance per drone to jam a t1 destroyer. http://www.edcollins.com/backgammon/diceprob.htm <-- look at the graph at the bottom, adjust numbers to match. The more 1pt jams you throw at a target the higher the probability that one gets through. This is why Dreads were made immune to ECM again during siege. Because it's BS. So my ship presently has 20 sensor strength, a jam drone has a 5% chance to jam me. The statistical probability of a single jamming drone removing me from combat completely for 20 whole seconds which is the same level of effectiveness as a dedicated jamming ship of any size and skill level, can only rise as the number of drones increases.

But you knew that already didn't you. It might be smallish chance of getting jammed every 20 seconds for a cruiser, but over multiple throws these multiple drones will probably jam you out at least 1 time.

Hey bro...
0.95^5 = 23%.

That's not insignificant. His example of a falcon was a cherry picked example.
An all 5 sacrilege has 26.4 (17.7%)
Curse - 33.6
napoc - 30
raven - 26.4
stratios - 24 (18.9%)

I can cherrypick too. Don't quote **** you don't understand.

Nothing cherrypicky here... your initial rant mentioned a ship specifically bonused for sensor strength, so I assumed a much higher baseline than what you apparently had in mind.
In the end it makes no difference whether your ship has 20 sensor strength (23% to get rekt) or 100 (5% to sit there watching your own drones to funny things) against 5 ec-300 drones: If you are alone and the target is able to escape due to a lucky dice roll, he did a way better job at eve than you, meaning you got outplayed, outsmarted and bob hates you and you never deserved the kill in the first place. Ensure sufficient tackle to account for the case of ecm drones, use bubbles or keep your own drones back till the target deploys ecm drones and dispose of them afap.

As outlined before, the problem can be solved or circumvented in many ways. Crying on the forum is not one of them...

PS: yes, the other ewar drones are severely lacking in power, they def need an overhaul to move them up to the level of support ecm drones can provide.